poniedziałek, 27 marca 2017

II/2: A-prefixing in English

A couple weeks ago I have read – and  listened as well – a song of the newest (2016) Noble Prize winner on literature, Bob Dylan. The lyrics was entitled “The Times They Are a-Changin'” and the title itself contained a strange grammatical form which attracted my attention, and I am not talking about the use of alveoral nasal /n/ instead of velar nasal /ŋ/ in the present participle suffix -ing, marked by -in' notation. This allomorph is quite common for informal English. But why a-?

Obviously, Bob Dylan used it for purpose of obtaining the number of syllables he wanted, but it is not like that he invented an non-existing form or added an accidental syllable. In fact, he used an archaic or – depends on context – a regional form.

There are at least two prefixes having form of a- /ə/ in English, one of Ancient Greek origin (along with its prevocalic allomorph an- /æn-/, used also before the letter 'h'; pronounciated in some words as /eɪ̯/; meaning “not”, used to form antonymes) and one(s) of Germanic origin and it will particularly interest us. For the record, there is also one or three a- originating in Latin ab-, ad- or ex- but they are rare and no longer productive as well as... absent in the Bob Dylan's lyrics.

The Germanic a- has several etymologies confused during development of the Modern English. The Oxford English Dictionary states as follows:

“[I]t naturally happened that all these a- prefixes were at length confusedly lumped together in idea, and the resultant a-looked upon as vaguely intensive, rhetorical, euphonic [nice-sounding], or even archaic, and wholly otiose [pointless].”

One of these a- prefixes can be found in such words as arise or ashame; the second one formed e.g. await; the third one is found in anew.; all of them are no longer productive and, I presume, were confused several centuries ago. The fourth and latter one originating in the preposition a and one of its meaning is “in the act or process of”. We can found the a-prefixing in some folk songs like A-Hunting We Will Go or religious ones like Here We Come A-wassailing; moreover, it is still common in present-day Appallachian and Ozark English (both are subdialects of Southern American White English) until today. You can learn more about this phenomenon here: http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/a-prefixing.

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